The Alice Behind Wonderland by Simon Winchester – review

There are no simple conclusions about Lewis Carroll's photos of Alice

The original Alice in Wonderland ... detail from Lewis Carroll's photograph (c 1862) of Alice Liddell, thought by Tennyson to be the most beautiful photograph he had ever seen. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Stephen Bates

Friday 15 April 2011 19.06 EDT
First published on Friday 15 April 2011 19.06 EDT

If one thing that we know for sure about Lewis Carroll is that he was a shy Victorian bachelor Oxford maths don named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, another thing we think we know is that he had sexual feelings towards children. All those photographs he took of pre-pubescent minors, some in the nude, some pouting provocatively – well, it stands to reason, as we impose modern speculation on the outlooks and sensibilities of a very different time.

Acres of print have been expended on Carroll's surrealism and Dodgson's sexuality, and here now is a very brief monograph by the prolific Simon Winchester. It is scarcely more than a clearing of the throat or an extended article between his big books on earthquakes and the Atlantic, focusing forensically on one photograph and one relationship: that with Alice Pleasance Liddell, the original Alice.

The collodion picture, taken in the garden of the deanery at Christ Church, at that time occupied by Alice's father, on a summer's day in 1858, is perhaps the most notorious of the nine portraits Dodgson made of Alice alone over 13 years. It shows the six-year-old child, dressed as a beggar girl, leaning nonchalantly against a wall. Considering how new and complicated the photographic process was, the picture taken by the 26-year-old Dodgson is extraordinarily sharp and technically accomplished. It required patience and steadiness from the little girl, too: 45 seconds' worth as the lens cap was removed, then replaced. You can interpret her expression as either sultry or – perhaps more credibly – bored and somewhat impatient. The picture is unsettling, the artifice too obvious: her ragged clothes draped off the shoulder, her left nipple just exposed.

It would be another four years before Alice and her sisters, Dodgson and his friend Robinson Duckworth rowed up the Thames to Godstow on their famous picnic, listening to Dodgson's wonderland tale. Was this an extempore story, Duckworth asked. "Oh yes, I am just making it up as I go along," Dodgson replied. Three years later, the expanded story was published and has never since been out of print.

But it is the photograph that fascinates Winchester, and in dissecting it, and the story of how it came to be produced, he questions some of the myths. Dodgson's photographs of children would have been seen differently by the sentimental Victorians as portraits of innocence. Alice's siblings – also photographed that day – would have been present, as would, almost certainly, Alice's formidable mother Lorina, or at least her governess, Mary Prickett, any of whom could presumably have stopped anything inappropriate happening.

The evidence is that the Liddell children doted on Dodgson, though Mrs Liddell eventually tired of the frequency with which he brought his Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera to the deanery garden. When there was eventually a rupture in his friendship with the Liddells, it now seems not to have been about his friendship with the children but about his unsuitability as a suitor for their oldest daughter, Ina, four years older than Alice and approaching marriageable age. They thought the governess would be more appropriate for his station in life. Oxford dons at that time were expected to remain bachelors, and Dodgson did: no one would have thought that odd.

Alice Liddell lived into her 80s and died in 1934 – there is newsreel film of her on a 1932 visit to New York. She did not disavow her childhood friendship with the shy, stuttering don, though she did not remain in contact with him in adulthood. If there was unease about the relationship for other than snobbish reasons, she didn't mention it.

Winchester's book is clearly aimed at the US market, not only in spelling but in its quaint American formulations: Carroll apparently went to the Rugby school, and Christ Church seems to have had a "classics dean". All the sadder, then, that Princeton University, which holds the original Alice photograph, would not allow him even to see it.